war, historians take questions on the 14th amendment and the reconstruction era. this question-and-answer session was part of a symposium hosted by the u.s. capital historical society, that commemorated the 150th anniversary of the 14th amendment's ratification to the u.s. constitution. it is just over 25 minutes. all: i would like to call of our speakers up to a giant and take questions from the audience about anything you want to talk about. anythinge of you had to say, which would be the first -- first in the history of the u.s. capital historical society conferences, then those of us who have spoken can argue with each other. all of us have been trained in , and all the speakers should come up. ,'m going to field questions

but if i feel the necessity of arguing, i will. i want to say one footnote to the last thing mark said. i have been racking my brains and the only thing i can think johnson, would have been when william henry harrison ran with john tyler because john tyler, who was a former democrat, basically had been run out of the democratic party and had no place to go. other than that, i'm trying to think of any time when people rent together from opposite parties. because of the weirdness of the electoral college, it was possible to get a situation where you would have a president and a vice president who were different parties. but that is a different question.

audience member: [inaudible] the republican party ran a person that had been a former confederate general and a onidis help.a ihave a rough guess that would guess because he had been runpublican, but didn't fdr with henry wallace on the ticket, and wasn't henry wallace a republican into the 1930's? it's a long stretch. he was a former

republican but when roosevelt forced him on the 1940 convention, i believe he was by then a democrat. >> and he was in roosevelt's cabinet of the time. audience member: miss brimmer, wardidn't you use daddy bucks and those types of cartoons in your speech? why didn't they use various cartoons in my speech? i'm not sure what you are asking but how would that relate to how it works? what are you envisioning? daddy warbuber: cks? >> are you talking about little orphan annie? audience member: i think that would be appropriate. i will certainly think about it

-- >> i will certainly think about it. , didn't show harriet tubman who was a civil war nurse. we don't have a lot of visual representations, and i haven't come across any. i usually ask people who they think about as civil war widows and black union widows, and many don't realize harriet tubman and susie king taylor received benefits as widows, but they petitioned in the 1890's on the basis of their labor as nurses. audience member: but he was a prominent middleman, daddy warboucks. that suggests the federal government. i'm looking at these issues from the perspective of working, poor women. audience member: back to the political parties' dispute.

bernie sanders was a registered independent that was running under the democratic ticket. if he actually won the primaries, it couldn't have been his party that he was nominated to run with. that was kind of interesting. when you werer: talking about voting when you give your presentation, you up until then that turn of the 20th century most voting was open voting, and that is that you declared. you didn't have a secret ballot, which had the effect of intimidating people as to which way they would vote, because their colleagues, their employers, etc. would be witnessing which way they voted. paul: i am not a specialist on

post civil war voting but my understanding is, people are casting ballots in ballot boxes well before the civil war. if you think about reconstruction, the parties would print ballots. so you would have republican ballots, you would have democratic ballots, and you simply put your ballot in the box. the voting you are talking about really disappears pretty much after the early revolution. audience member: i don't think so. in kentucky. they remained in kentucky until 1891. and i think it continued after that in virginia. audience member: i think it did. could take areas of the city, depending upon the laboring people and you could start telling which way they voted. and they usually voted as a block. gets trickier than that.

even in virginia, you've got paper ballots. technically, that means the ballot can be secret. it is folded up. you can't tell who's ballot you have got. but the ballots are not printed by the government, they are printed by the parties. keep republicans from passing out the ballot, nobody's going to be able to vote. you go up to the organizers there and if people don't have the ballots, they don't vote. box goes backlot a long way. and the problem of voice voting is it prevents the emergence, especially in the 19 century, of that wonderful chicago policy of the voting early and often. >> so for that short, shining. you had radical republicans running the ship of state.

what one thing could they have done that would have made thaddeus stevens feel better a few days before his death? what did they miss that could actually be done by the radical republican congress? driving it from a legislative what could those guys have contributed realistically, that they didn't? >> let me offer one suggestion. i put my life and to the two worlds of being a historian and a law professor, doing both, teaching constitutional law, teaching history, and now being president of the college which is a different life experience. but my sense of the failure of a failure ofn is imagination on the part of northern republicans. that is, northern republicans,

whether they were crude and ben wade, as he was known, and when challenged for a duel in the 1850's he excepted, and said i would choose a squirrel guns at 10 paces, and that ended the duel , because know what is going to do that. are a big you frontiersman like him who was rough and tumble, or as refined and sophisticated as charles sumner, i think almost no republicans could envision the thein which, once defeated, south could not accept defeat and could not accept that their world had changed. asked me, whyve did it take three amendments, not just ending slavery.

why did you end of slavery and then have to do the 14th and then the 15th? it was because of this failure of imagination, that once you ended slavery, the assumption for many northerners is that you would move to equality. int is what had happened many northern states. it didn't happen immediately but pennsylvania, the first place in the history of the world to begin to end slavery by passing the pennsylvania abolition act thehe early 1780's, once former slaves became free, they could testify against whites, they could own property, they could vote, and this was an assumption. , butoting wasn't universal among many republicans they were strongly in favor of suffrage in the 1850's. there were a number of attempts to get universal male suffrage

in northern states. it fails, not for republicans not trying, so they assumed that , we have defeated the south, we you ended slavery, and can't have a republican form of government is half or even one the potentialf electorate is shut out. so one way to seek reconstruction is this gradual education of the north as to what is going on in the south. book comes out, my paper will be expanded as well talkbody's, and i will about the hearings of the joint committee on reconstruction in 1866, where members of congress are utterly shocked at the level of violence going on in the south.

so i think it's an education process, but my other panelists may disagree. landwas going to say reform. i was curious to know what you all would think of that, because it would have had to have been enforced and might have met with more violent resistance. forget the homestead act that south carolina instituted, the problem was the terroristic society. let me go back to the enforcement issue. the president wanted to enforce it. it was because congress would not back him up, and as paul said in the north in particular, with the republicans losing elections afterwards. so i think you can't let ingress off that easily, terms of the enforcement. there is a great letter grant they used troops to kill native americans and build the

railroads and, i have black soldiers being killed in the south and they would not let me take them there. i wasn't being facetious when i said that the rule of law, whatever you might think of lincoln, would you imagine lincoln tolerating the abuse of the rule of law? this was a coup d'etat in america, and it wasn't the only one. there were some in the 1890's that continued to overthrow the legitimately elected government through the use of violence, not just violence by murder. alternatively would have been war crimes trials. the confederate high command committed war crimes throughout the war. they condoned or participated in the murder of surrendering u.s. troops. when lee invades pennsylvania,

his troops go off on slave hunting ventures where they arrest and sees free 6lack's and drag them back to the south. lee is leaving his wounded on the battlefield, leaving his equipment on the battlefield, taken captured free blacks in pennsylvania so they can enslave them. this was a war about slavery. the world did not see this kind of behavior since the roman armies, and one could have wirtzed instead of henry being the only trials, it was simply the first of many. but nobody had the stomach for that. audience member: this question futuremiss landry, professor landry maybe, i don't know. you would have some lucky students of that is the case. i'm curious about native american tribes who fought for the confederacy. did they do that because of an accident of where they were, or did they do it calculating that

they would somehow arrest the treatment of indians as the slaveholding power moved west, and if that was the calculation, was it a miscalculation? >> i don't know. [laughter] audience member: thank you. large slaveowners, they were divided, and they were also dividing the people put them on the trail of tears. in both cases you have a large investment in slavery by a number of the civilized tribes, , what hasve also the the union done to us in the trail of tears, so there is a lot of that. >> most natives who fight for theconfederacy are from

five civilized tribes, and one of the reasons they were called civilized is because they owned slaves. are out of oklahoma. the cherokee nation virtually has its own civil war between the slaveowners who would fight for the confederacy and many charity who joined -- many erokee who joined the u.s. army. if you ever see that totally made up painting of lee surrendering at appomattox, in the background of the painting is a man with very dark skin, standing behind general grant. a senecais eli parker, indian who at the time is a kernel but will later become a brigadier general in the army, and he later becomes the first had of the bia after the war. audience member: follow-up

question. i can't remember if you said it over lunch yesterday or during the proceedings today. >> what were you drinking last night? [laughter] wasence member: buchanan anticipating arizona and new mexico would become slave states. who did the native americans in the mississippi delta think they would have to replace in order to create cotton plantations? not ae i'm pretty sure whole weren't interested in planting cotton. know, most of the native american participation in the war is from what is today oklahoma, then the indian territory, and people east of

the mississippi who are mostly in the north. iroquois.gneca, in the upper midwest in minnesota, native peoples are probably watching the war thinking this is great, they are going to leave us alone for a little while. and again, this in part goes , at the end of the war, where do these great heroes who emancipated the slaves and destroyed slavery, where do they end up? the end up fighting the nas perce war. ironies are tragic and sad everywhere. audience member: it's interesting when we look back,

we don't realize but the confederacy sent out diplomats, diplomatic relations, to recruit the native americans. they were just choosing size, they said we are going to promise you certain things if you fight for the confederacy. so you had that going on as well, a deliberate strategy for treatment, knowing they had also enslave people. i'm interested: in the connection between what you said and an article in "the journal of american history" about the impact of the wives of army troops, african-american troops in world war i, when the government decided that they should send part of the soldier's paid to the wife -- pay to the wife.

and it was discovered that the wives of black troops were getting more money from the government than they were getting from their domestic jobs in the south, and congress tried to cut off the allotment of money to black women in the because they could not get domestic help in their homes. is that article by k walter hickle? in your question, i think you'd answered it, that these allotments meant they would have more money to navigate the social structure in a way that would leave their white employers without domestic servants. add that this was

around issues in an earlier time when black household servants are protesting and striking, and you are having these same sorts of issues with wage disputes because they are acting outside of what is proscribed for them within their society. >> we have one more question, and one short answer. audience member: to keep on this the landeconomics, reform and labor reform that would go along with that, so much of the property on white ownership in fact was based on the mortgaging of black lives. taking them out of the picture and then not being able to reconstruct an economy, i would like to hear you talk about that.

i understand what you are saying, but i'm not sure what your question i truly is. audience member: how does that fit with what could have been done, given the economic change? nub of thethe matter. our nation's economy depended on uncompensated labor, especially the economy of the south. and after the civil war, they still needed that labor and they wanted to pay as little as possible for it. and i think that has an awful lot to do with the terrorism. and then you have the development of the convict lease system, of sharecropping, essentially the reimposition of thinkured servitude and i

it is very much, in my view, the racism is a convenient ideology for the exploitation of this labor. notet me add that we have studied reconstruction as much as we studied what happened after reconstruction. when african americans had an opportunity to vote for the candidates during reconstruction, they elected people. they changed the laws. what it meant to be a tenant is very different what we think of as a share cropper. the person under reconstruction in many states were black legislators were there with their allies changed the laws, so it wasn't the landowners, it was the laborers. you can trace that out and it goes act to the laborers. that made a difference. people were making a difference economically. begot economics

rights. who lead this coup d'etat to overthrow the government writing black legislators to ask for favors. of the vote was soaked sacred and important, we forgot that. we can see what happened to america over the years and we forgot how important the vote is. african-americans understood it and they voted for their interests and it made a huge difference. so to think about what happened after reconstruction was overthrown, and what i call the restoration, is very different than what happened during those times, a true revolution in women's rights, all sorts of things in the states where african-americans had an opportunity to elect people of their choice to represent their interests. that's why i think, more than anything else, that you have this violent overthrow. because it was failing, but

because it was working so well and people were working up the social order. i think politics matter, they opened up an homage uportunities -- opened economic opportunities. that opened up social opportunities. wrote was in a small southern community, and a deacon in the baptist church mary's on the courthouse steps his former slave. i really think those kinds of differences mattered, and we were wrong to separate them out and not see that reconstruction was making a difference in the lives of people at the local levels, because when a judge decided disputes it could often be an african-american deciding the dispute, or certainly a white republican who depended on african-americans. those things were making a difference in people's lives, both blacks and whites.

the government: up in new orleans during reconstruction and during the civil war when they, when the they passed charge, a minimum wage laws, progressive .abor laws >> we could go on for hours, except we would all be kicked out. the people to thank at the capitol historical , jill berkowitz, don ofnon, my panelists and most all the audience. you have been wonderful. thank you for a fabulous day.

[applause] 1968: nine-week series, america in turmoil, is available as a podcast. find it on our website c-span.org/history. this is american history tv, only on c-span3. >> this week on the communicators, fcc commissioner michael o'rielly, on the elimination of net neutrality and the expected surge in corporate mergers after the at&t-time warner merger. esther o'reilly is interviewed by paul kirby. -- mr. o'reilly is interviewed by paul kirby. >> in the last administration,

t-mobile and sprint did not try to merge. should there be for nationwide wireless carriers? >> i do not have such a structure. i want to take the application put forth before the commission and analyze that in terms of the data that is presented. what are the circumstances in the marketplace? one of the providers? what are the promises that they are providing? what is the debt load they are taking on? are they going to meet those obligations? i would look at the application as forthright as i expected, and i don't have an artificial number in my head that should be this or that. havingre benefits to more and stronger providers. i want to see what the circumstance may be and i take the applications as they are presented to me. watch the communicators

monday at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span two. next on american history tv, we explore how george c marshall's helped prepare for his assignment as army chief of staff during world war ii. andrey kozak is a library archival director. this is about 45 minutes. jeffery: most of us know about dwight d. eisenhower and most of us know about harry truman, and most of us know about general macarthur. but george c marshall, a little bit less.